LONG BEACH – One can’t pitch much better than Ben Fox did Thursday night for the Long Beach Armada. The left-hander mixed a crisp fastball with a beautiful curveball all night, striking out eight in eight splendid innings.

But the Armada managed only two hits against St. George right-hander David Seccombe, and the Roadrunners defeated Long Beach, 2-0, at Blair Field.

Seccombe came in 5-2 but possessor of a 5.19 ERA.

That ERA is inflated because St. George’s home park is hitter-friendly. And, yes, Seccombe was aided by terrific defense that included three circus catches by center fielder Chase Leavitt, who was making his professional debut.

But Seccombe looked more like Roger Clemens out there at times. He retired the last 19 batters he faced, a club record. He also struck out seven even though he came in with just 28 strikeouts in 52 innings.

Long Beach is 3-7 in the second half of the Golden Baseball League’s South Division schedule. The Armada will have the next four days off and will return to action Tuesday, when they play host to Yuma.

Long Beach’s only two hits were a single by Jonny Kaplan and a double by Omar Bramasco. Steve Moss was 0-for-3 and victim of one of Leavitt’s highlight reel-worthy catches.

“Honestly, I don’t think the result of the game really reflected how we went about business today,” Moss said. “I actually thought we hit the ball. There’s a difference between hitting the ball and not getting hits. They just weren’t finding any grass out there, unfortunately. One or two hits could have changed the game.”

Armada batters at times appeared to make it easy for Seccombe, who needed just four pitches to retire the side in the seventh inning.

“What happens is, when a pitcher gets in a rhythm like that and throwing the way he’s throwing, guys go up there and they’re looking for that fastball because he had a pretty good 12-6 breaking ball he was throwing,” Armada manager Garry Templeton said. “So what happens is guys want to jump on that first pitch that they see, which is a fastball because they don’t want to get to it. Which, we fuss in the dugout, but you can only fuss so much. These guys have to make an adjustment.

“But you have to tip your hat to that pitcher. That pitcher had some pretty good stuff.”

So did Fox (3-5). He gave up only five hits and walked none. He was touched by Rudy Yan’s run-scoring single in the third and by Yosvany Almario’s run-scoring double in the fifth.

Other than that, he was pretty much untouchable.

“These guys are just like any other team in this league, they sit on fastballs,” Fox said of the Roadrunners (5-3), who won the first-half title. “So pretty much, what I wanted to do was get ahead early with the fastball early in the game and then change it up later on in the game and get ahead with the offspeed.”